Adaptive and Robust Techniques (ART) for Thermoacoustic Tomography in Breast Cancer Detection

We present adaptive and robust techniques (ART) for thermoacoustic tomography with application in breast cancer detection. TAT combines high contrast and high resolution. The current image reconstruction methods used for TAT, such as the widely used Delay-and-Sum (DAS) approach, are data-independent and suffer from low resolution, high sidelobe levels, and poor interference rejection capabilities. The data- adaptive ART have much better performance than their data- independent counterparts. By allowing certain uncertainties, ART can mitigate the amplitude and phase distortion problems encountered in TAT. The excellent performance of ART is demonstrated using both simulated and experimentally measured data.